dat-http-proxy

A tool for replicating dats stored at static http/s web addresses.

Don’t know what a dat is? Learn more here.

Why

Dat is awesome, but at the moment it can become expensive if you are storing large datasets on a VPS. This tool helps you cheaply add redundancy to your peer to peer network by enabling you to serve multiple read-only dat archives from static web hosts.

With this library you can setup one server with minimal storage and serve any number of large dats that are stored elsewhere.

Note: If you are only storing small dats - look at Hashbase.io. It is a great service which at the moment offers a free tier for dats up to 100MB.

Install

To use as a CLI utility

npm dat-http-proxy -g

or to use from within another project

npm dat-http-proxy --save

Usage

Command Line Interface

To replicate a single url:

dat-http-proxy [url]

To manage multiple urls:

To use as a cli you need to create a file called url-feeds containing a list of urls.

For example:

http://dats.metadada.xyz/openaustralia/senate_debates/
http://dats.metadada.xyz/openaustralia/representatives_debates/
http://dats.metadada.xyz/openaustralia/members/

Then simply run dat-http-proxy from the command line. If you modify the url-feeds file, the dat-http-proxy process will update live adding or removing connections to the url.

Note: At the moment this application will fail hard if you pass a malformed url.

API

Simply import the package into your project.

// es6
import httpProxy from 'dat-http-proxy'
// commonjs
var httpProxy = require('dat-http-proxy')

var dats = httpProxy.all()

Return all loaded dat archives. Explicitly ignores those loading or scheduled for removal.

var urls = httpProxy.urls()

Returns all the urls currently being served. Explicitly ignores those loading or scheduled for removal.

var dat = httpProxy.add(url)

Attempts to load a url as a dat archive and begins serving it. Returns a promise which resolves to a dat instance.

httpProxy.remove(url)

Removes the url and closes the associated dat archive.